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When my girlfriend and I set up house together in the early ‘70s, the pill had already unleashed the sexual revolution, but having a child “out of wedlock” was still linked to eternal damnation and premarital cohabitation was seen in some quarters as living in sin.

In a 1971 survey, just one in five Canadians agreed that a couple should live together before deciding to get married.

Our decision to move in together was a relatively thoughtless act. It wasn’t made to test the waters for tying the knot; it was just what people did in my circle of friends at the time. We were away from home, proud of our independence and infused with the smug assurance of youth.

Cohabitation was a stage in a relationship that was reached early on. It didn’t imply a particular level of commitment and no thought was given in the beginning to how it might end. We had no possessions to speak of, so there were no worries about how our assets would be divided if we broke up. Our joint bank account was an empty vessel, more hope than achievement in the early days.

Last week, the end of a common-law relationship was given new status in British Columbia. Revisions to the Family Law Act made it so anyone who has been living in a common-law relationship for at least two years will be treated the same as if they had been married for the purposes of property division if they split up. That means any assets they accumulated during the time they were together will be evenly divided.

That includes the increase in value of any assets, such as a house, that one partner or the other owned before the relationship began.

This change isn’t the first official recognition of common-law relationships. Unmarried couples have long been able to file joint income tax returns after a year of living together. Various workplace benefit plans have their own definitions of spouse that include common-law relationships.

And common-law relationships are a lot more common and widely accepted than they used to be. By the mid-1990s, an Angus Reid survey found that three-quarters of Canadians agreed it was “OK for a couple to live together before they were married.”

The number of couples in Canada who were living together but not married rose from 13.7 per cent of all families in the 2001 census to 16.3 per cent in 2011. Over the same period, the percentage of married couples fell from 70.5 per cent to 67 per cent.

For no reason that I can ascertain, couples in British Columbia are more likely than the national average to get married – 71.7 per cent – and less likely — 13 per cent – to live together without getting formally hitched. Quebec has the highest percentage of common-law couples at 31.5 per cent while just over half – 51.9 per cent – are married.

B.C. isn’t the first province to recognize the equivalent of spousal rights for cohabitants. Manitoba has had a similar provision since 2004.

It’s a worthwhile law. There have been too many cases where one partner, usually the woman, has come away from a failed relationship without her fair share of assets that were acquired jointly.

The change in the law will make the second anniversary of moving in together more significant. But it may also give new meaning to the decision to move in together. Two people in a conjugal relationship will now be living in the knowledge that regardless of whether they consciously decide on a commitment, the simple passage of time will make one for them.

As it happened, my girlfriend and I did not break up while we were living together. We didn’t face the challenge of disposing of joint property until after we got married. I don’t think for us that the law would have made any difference. Our parting was civil, if not pleasant.

In the past week, reaction to the change in the law has included people who have bristled at having their commitment to their partner defined for them.

But given that the dissolution of a relationship implies that two people aren’t getting along all that well, the legal recognition of rights and responsibilities imposed by the revision to family law in B.C. shouldn’t be considered an unreasonable intrusion by the state into private lives.

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